This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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15 Can’t-Miss Summer Events Starting With Yiddish ‘Fiddler’
My best memories of summer are of the arts: Catching a B.B. King concert in a Denver August downpour; waiting in the humid heat for a free ticket to “My Fair Lady” at the Muny in St. Louis; spreading a jacket on the beach at Coney Island and watching the riveting and under-recognized “Crown Heights”…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Jay-Z And Beyoncé
Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the first couple of pop music, kick off their second co-headlining stadium tour — dubbed the On the Run II Tour — on June 6 in Cardiff, Wales (home to about two in five Jews in Wales, or about 800 total). The tour will run through Europe for a month and a…
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Hollywood: Where Jews Don’t Get To Play Jews
I was 4 or 5 when the hot topic at dinner was the movie version of “Marjorie Morningstar.” Too young to understand why Mom was unhappy about it, I understood enough to get that Natalie Wood, a goy, had been cast in the title role in the screen adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel. But why…
The Latest
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In These Sacred Spaces, Judaism, Islam And Christianity Intersect
Christians in Muslim countries face violence and harassment. The same goes for Muslims in Christian countries and Israel. And, as Tom Lehrer sang, “everybody hates the Jews.” This isn’t new information, and many before me have pointed out the irony that the three main Abrahamic religions are so often at each other’s throats. Even if…
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Books Why Having A Female Body In 2018 Is Like Living In A War Zone
Gross Anatomy by Mara Altman “I thought there were just two kinds of girls in the world. The fat ones and the skinny ones. I never knew there were so many things to hate about myself.” Mean Girls There is an infinite amount of things that can be wrong with a person’s body. From chin…
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What’s Marijuana Doing In The Talmud — And Hashish Too?
For linguists, copy editors, and Hebrew obsessives the world over, this has been a marijuana-filled week. Allow me to explain: this week, the Associated Press issued guidelines on the use of marijuana in news stories — the word, not the drug. And also this week, the Academy of Hebrew Language took to Twitter to explain…
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With Compassion, Yossi Klein Halevi Reaches Out To His Neighbors
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor By Yossi Klein Halevi Harper, 224 pages $24.99 On the front of the postcard was a photograph of Jews praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall; on the other side, a brief message: “Thank you for helping me find my way home,” it read, signed, “An American Israeli Jewish Friend.” The recipient…
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Absolutely Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Schnorrers
I grew up in Monsey, New York, where schnorrers of all kinds go door to door, asking for help paying for everything from a daughter’s wedding to major surgery to yeshiva tuition to something as basic as feeding many mouths. The busiest times come when Shabbat approaches, on Thursday evenings and Friday afternoons. I never…
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Why Han Solo is the most goyish ‘Star Wars’ hero
In Lenny Bruce’s terms, Han Solo always struck me as the most goyish of the “Star Wars” heroes. And in the new film “Solo,” he seems even more so. Recall (or, for a younger generation, come and learn) that for the outlaw comedian Lenny Bruce, Jewishness was a matter of sensibility more than religion or…
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The Secret Jewish History Of The Pet Hamster
On April 12, 1930, a Zionist zoologist, his Syrian guide, a local sheikh and a group of hired laborers gathered in a wheat field outside Aleppo, Syria. They started digging. Hours passed without incident, save for the destruction of a fair portion of a local farmer’s crop. Undeterred, they continued excavating until, at last, the…
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Philip Roth’s Forgotten Tape: The Beginnings of The Great American Writer
I last spoke with Philip about a week before his death. A few days earlier, I had emailed him the tape that I discovered of the 1962 Yeshiva University symposium that he’d remember always as a crucial turning point — one, in equal measure, dreadful and indispensable. It was just the sort of experience that,…
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